They Came to Stay

An American anthropologist's oral history of the North Americans - workers, engineers, Communists, and above all Black Americans - who emigrated to the Soviet Union, mostly in the Depression years, and stayed.

Its finest material concerns the group of Black cotton scientists from Tuskegee and Hampton who went to Soviet Central Asia in the early 1930s, among them Oliver Golden, born on a Mississippi plantation where his father had been a slave, who went to grow cotton and to raise a daughter he did not want subjected to American racism. Langston Hughes crossed the mud of the new Uzbek republic to spend Christmas of 1932 with them, and wrote about it afterwards.

Paula Garb found the survivors of that world, and their children, half a century later, and wrote their lives down before they were lost. That is a real service.

She was not a propagandist by trade but a genuine ethnographer - at the time of writing a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Ethnography, and later a serious fieldworker on the Caucasus. She lived the subject, settling in Moscow in 1975 and raising two sons in Soviet schools, and the book closes with a long first-person account of her own life there.

The voices are real voices and the affection for them is not feigned.

Spine and text agree: a 1987 book, its latest references the Twenty-Seventh Congress of 1986 and a Gorbachev interview of that February.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.